No one will doubt that "Garden of Evil" has a great cast. Gary Cooper, Susan Hayward, Richard Widmark and Cameron Mitchell are leads; Hugh Marlowe and Victor Mendoza are in supporting roles; and Rita Morena has something a little more than a cameo. But a cast is only as good as their performances. And their performances depend a great deal on the script they have with which to work. This film fails miserably mostly because of a terrible script. And the acting is generally sub-par for most of the cast – and very bad by Gary Cooper.The DVD I watched had a bonus with it on the making of this film. It is referred to as a morality tale about greed, good and evil. But the script is so terrible that it ruins everything about the story. A couple of other reviewers saw the same thing. The writers tried to make the Cooper and Widmark roles philosophical. Ergo, the terse, flat replies, especially by Cooper. They come across as wisecracks or put-downs. Then, Widmark's character waxes poetic frequently about any situation. Again, to what point or avail? Susan Hayward's Leah Fuller is driven to find help to rescue a man caught in a cave-in. Well, is it her husband, or isn't it? He doesn't call her honey or darling, but "You," a person who came back. She doesn't call him darling or honey or husband. We don't ever know if they are man and wife until he's killed by Indians and they bury him on the trail. Leah takes her wedding ring off and presses it into the dirt over his grave.Is she driven by love, gold or what? The screenplay raises many questions in the minds of the audience, and it never answers most of them. Hayward is OK in her role, even if we never learn exactly what her aims may be. Mitchell overacts, and Widmark's Fiske is a very talkative role that seems to be philosophical but doesn't make sense much of the time. We never know why Marlowe doesn't seem to have affection for Leah. Was he driven by her to look for gold? Did she marry him so that he would find a gold mine for her, or was it for love? Or both? The most disappointing and frustrating role to me is Cooper's Hooker. Toward the end we find out that he formerly was a sheriff. But now he's a fortune hunter, along with the rest, heading West on a steamship for the gold fields of California. His lines are so poor, I can't believe he would take this part in a movie. They seem to affect his whole character and he is wooden throughout the film. Cooper was 53 when this movie was made, and he died seven years later of prostate cancer. I thought he may have been ill in this film because he seemed very old, and never is there a close-up of his face. Yet he made a few very good films after this one.Then, there are the Indians. Did Apaches range as far south as the jungles of southern Mexico? When Hooker and Fiske shoot the Indians pursuing them on the cliff trail, they must have been terrible shots – or they shot the horses. I think every Indian that fell over the cliff screamedThe only reason this movie gets even five stars from me is for the scenery. This is one of the first films shot in Cinemascope, which was the invention of Fox Films. I remember reading or hearing a commentary recently about one of the top directors who didn't like the wide panorama format of Cinemascope. But this clearly was a movie for that. And, its sweeping panoramas and vistas shot in the mountains and jungles of southern Mexico are beautiful to behold. It's just too bad that Fox wasn't as interested in having a movie with a very good screenplay as it was in filming as many movies as it could in its new format.In this case, the format is the only reason to see this movie. Unless one wants to see a top cast in a poor movie with a terrible script and some weak to very bad performances. If viewers are interested in seeing a Western about gold and greed, I recommend a couple of excellent films. "Mackenna's Gold" of 1969 has a top notch cast with Gregory Peck, Omar Sharif, Telly Savalas, Keenan Wynn, Lee J. Cobb, Raymond Massey and Julie Newmar. "The Treasure of the Sierra Madre" of 1948 won three Oscars and starred Humphrey Bogart, Walter Huston, Tim Holt and Bruce Bennett.

It's gold rush time and en route to California, Hooker (Gary Cooper), Fiske (Richard Widmark), and Luke Daly (Cameron Mitchell) stop over in a small Mexican village. Here the three men hook up with Vicente Madariaga (Victor Manuel Mendoza) and are lured by a desperate Leah Fuller (Susan Hayward) to go rescue her husband John (Hugh Marlowe), who is trapped in a gold mine up in the mountains. Mountains where hostile Indians lay in wait, but the Apache are not the only thing to be worried about, the other is themselves.With that cast, Henry Hathaway directing, Bernard Herrmann scoring and CinemaScope inspired location work coming from a volcano region in Mexico: you would think that Garden Of Evil would be far more well known than it actually is. That it isn't comes as no surprise once viewing it for oneself.Hathaway's film has real good intentions, it wants to be a brooding parable about the effects of greed, a character examination as men are forced to question their motives. Yet the film is muddled and winds up being bogged down by its eagerness to be profound. That it looks fabulous is a bonus of course, yet with this story the locale seems badly at odds in the narrative. This is more Aztec adventure than Western, I kept expecting one of Harryhausen's skeletons, or a Valley Of Gwangi dinosaur to home into view, not Apache Indians, who quite frankly are miscast up there in them thar hills. Herrmann's score is terrific, truly, but it's in the wrong movie. It would be more at home in some science fiction blockbuster, or at least in some Jason & The Argonauts type sword and sandal piece.It has its good points, notably the cast who give compelling performances and some shots are to die for, with the final shot in the film one of the finest there is. But this is a wasted opportunity and proof positive that putting fine technical ingredients together can't compensate for an over ambitious and plodding script. 5/10

Garden Of Evil is an entertaining and well made Technicolor/Cinemascope adventure that shows a part of Mexico's interior not usually shown in western pictures.The plot involves Gary Cooper and his treasure seeking pals being paid to rescue Susan Hayward's husband from a collapsed goldmine located in the supposedly cursed title area. Little do they know that the local superstitious natives are enraged at their encroachment.Things get a little odd with every character (save the always laid back Cooper) becoming very melodramatic, especially Hugh Marlowe as Hayward's husband. His performance crosses the line into overacting as every bit of dialog he mutters is in the form of a rant!Also on the verge of of overacting is Cameron Mitchell as the "kid" of the bunch. In my mind's eye he'll always be the older overweight actor I remember from numerous films of the late sixties and early seventies. It's very strange to see him young and lean.It was a good call on the part of the filmmakers to not show the furious natives until near the end and then only show brief glimpses. As the unseen menace, it really heightened the atmosphere of dread and helped build tension, making the eventual appearance of the Indians a frightening matter.The final act is exciting, scary, and suspenseful.

I don't think anyone would argue that this is one of the better Westerns ever made. The story has Susan Hayward's husband trapped in a gold mine in a hinterland of Mexico inhabited by Apaches. She finds four men at loose ends in a seaside cantina -- the strong and silent Gary Cooper, the cynical gambler Richard Widmark, the hypomanic and libidinous Cameron Mitchell, and the proud and competent Victor Mendoza, who is a Mexican, you can tell, because he wears a big floppy sombrero and speaks only Spanish. Hayward hires these four guys to ride with her through dangerous country, rescue her husband, and return with the couple to town. Hayward was a decent actress in the right part, but as a low-down gold digger in Terra Incognita she doesn't cut it. Her grooming is impeccable, as if Sidney Guilaroff were hiding behind one of the cactus.The film didn't cost much to make, though the principles were all box-office boffo at the time. I guess that's where most of the money went, to salaries and to the film's technology. It's in glorious Cinemascope, the movies' answer to television, and the Michoacan locations are glorious. Bernard Hermann contributed the only musical score he ever wrote for a Western.Nothing -- nada -- seems to have been left over to construct a coherent narrative. Nobody's motives are especially clear. Worse than that, sometimes they're incomprehensible. Try to figure out what the relationship between Susan Hayward and her husband, Hugh Marlowe, are. Does he love her? Does she love him? Do they hate each other? It isn't that such ambivalent attitudes aren't found in real life. They're the stuff of it. It's just that the writers seemed to have no idea what they were trying to get across.And it's the same with the other characters. Richard Widmark's role, for instance, is written at the beginning almost as a familiar stereotype, the untrusting and untrustworthy man of fortune who may either sacrifice his life for a dame in distress or strike like a rattlesnake -- but he turns out to be just another one of the good guys. The Apaches are given a motive for their banzai attacks, but what a motive it is! They don't mind two loners digging away in a mine, but SIX people trigger the charge of the light brigade.The dialog is reflects the overall conception of character, listless and done as if by numbers. "If the earth was made of gold, I guess people would kill just for a handful of dirt," Cooper philosophizes. What does that mean? None of that takes away from the visual imagery. Man, volcanic rocks and all, it is a splendidly scenic place where certain types might be happy to roll around naked in the black ash. Nice job, there.I can't help mentioning the audio commentary on the DVD. It's all about Bernard Hermann's score, and it's both instructive and amusing, though the four contributors didn't intend it to be funny. Hermann's biographer is heard, along with a film historian and two film composers, and they sit around bitching about how in today's industry the composer is ground under the heels of the director and those to whom they contemptuously refer as "sound designers." They all laud Hermann, one of those filmic composers who, unlike Henry Mancini and some others, had never written "tunes" into their musical scores. You won't hear "Laura", "Moon River", or "Do Not Forsake Me, Oh My Darlin'". Instead Hermann included diverse themes or leitmotifs for the settings and characters, sometimes only a few notes. As one commentator puts it, it's as if a Hermann score consisted of endless repetitions of "Jeepers Creepers," without ever getting to, "Where'd you get those eyes?"